The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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"Gentlemen" of the motte. What do you expect in return for... being a gentleman.
I was reading a post in my cities subreddit asking "Do you give up your metroseat for women?".
Most responses were along the lines of "no unless they are pregnant". But some were really making an attempt to claim the moral highground. "My mom raised me to be a gentlemen" from the males to "there are no more gentlemen!" From the females.
I was left thinking thats well and good. But no man is actually taking a purely raw deal just because right? He must expect something in return, not from the individual woman, but the social structure as a whole. I dont know.
What is that something?
A healthy soul. It's not a transaction, it's axiomatic. You don't do it because it delivers good results, you do it because it's good to do.
I would argue that it only appears axiomatic because it was useful for the millennia humans lived in tribes where a small action to a neighbor or stranger benefitted the group’s sum total good (including expansion of lands and progeny down the line). If the well-being of my descendants is inherently tied to the well-being of the person down the street, which it is in pre-modernity, then the rule of always helping neighbors or strangers is optimal for the group’s good. Today, spending even an iota of thought on a stranger is worse for your own group’s interest, unless you are picking and choosing who to help.
Perhaps an equivalent example would be how there’s a difference between doing extra help in a group project, and then secretly helping a competing project.
Right, but doing little things like this don't require any thought at all. Very likely you are spending more thought here, arguing over these trivial rituals of etiquette, that it does to enact them.
If I’m a person who rides the bus daily, the thought is not trivial
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